Dutch advanced students of French read a French short story in one of three text reading conditions: Marginal Glosses (provision of L1 translations of unknown words), Dictionary (opportunity to use a bilingual dictionary), or Control. After reading, students were tested for their recall of 16 words that had appeared either once or three times in the text. Support was found for the hypothesis that frequency of occurrence will foster incidental vocabulary learning more when advanced second language (L2) readers are given the meanings of unknown words through marginal glosses or when they look up meanings in a dictionary than when no external information concerning unknown words' meanings is available. In the former case, reappearance of a word will reinforce the form‐meaning connection in the reader's mental lexicon. In the latter case, readers will often ignore unknown words or incorrectly infer their meanings, which will limit the frequency effect. This article ends with recommendations for teachers and researchers.

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The quality of word knowledge in a second language (L2) and the assessment of it is a growing field of interest. Read (1993) presented a test format that assesses the quality of word knowledge by means of word associations. The present study examined the development of the word knowledge of 2 groups of advanced learners of French as a L2 by means of a slightly revised version of this test format. Three aspects in particular were studied. First, there was the type of distractor most suited to the participants: distractors semantically related to the stimulus word versus semantically nonrelated distractors. Second, the role of the 3 types of associations was distinguished: paradigmatic, syntagmatic, and analytic. Third, the study linked qualitative aspects of word knowledge to quantitative aspects, by distinguishing 5 frequency ranges. The semantically related distractors were found to be more appropriate to assess the quality of word knowledge of advanced learners than the semantically nonrelated distractors. The participants showed a preference for paradigmatic responses, as expected. There was a relation between frequency and quality of knowledge: The more frequent a word, the better the knowledge of the tested aspects.ACCORDING TO NATION (1990), KNOWLedge of a word can be divided into knowledge concerning its form, its position, its function, and its meaning. Thus, it is not the case that a word is either known or unknown. A word can be known in all sorts of degrees: from knowing that a given form is an existing word to knowledge including all four aspects mentioned above. These degrees of word knowledge apply to native speakers as well as to second language (L2) learners. Their vocabularies expand in breadth (the number of known words grows) but also in depth (the knowledge concerning the words already known increases, in other words, the quality of what the learner knows increases).The majority of vocabulary tests concern breadth of word knowledge. 1 There are as yet few test formats that test the quality of word knowledge in an efficient way. Read (1993) and Schoonen and Verhallen (1998) made a start by developing deep-word knowledge tests based on word associations. Both tests assess receptive word knowledge and address, in particular, knowledge about the meaning of a word, the words with which it is associated, and the collocations in which it occurs. Read looked at university students of English and tested their knowledge of "academic" words, whereas Schoonen and Verhallen tested the base word knowledge of 9-and 11-year-old Dutch children, natives as well as nonnatives. An item on Read's test consists of a target word followed by eight other words, four of which are semantically related to the target word, and four of which are not. The L2 learner has to indicate which are the related words.An item has the following structure: edit arithmetic film pole publishing revise risk surface text

The present study is a continuation of the work presented in the 2001 article by Greidanus and Nienhuis. In the current study, we also examine the quality of word knowledge among advanced learners of French as a second language (L2) by means of a word associates test. We studied the development of word knowledge among six groups of university-level participants, who were (a) native speakers of French and (b) learners of French as a foreign language with two different first languages (L1s), Dutch and English. The format of the test differed from that used in the 2001 Greidanus and Nienhuis study as follows: (a) the tested words were less frequently used French words; (b) the participants were native speakers of French in addition to two categories of advanced learners of French; (c) the number of associate words (fixed or not) was an independent variable. The findings showed that both native and non-native speakers of French progressed in deep-word knowledge when the results of third- and fourth-year students were compared with those of first-year students. Although the test contained a considerable number of French-English cognates, the L1 English learners did not perform better than the Dutch learners. The words tested were not noticeably more difficult when chosen from the 10,000-word level rather than from the 5,000-word level.

The present study is a continuation of the work presented in the 2001 article by Greidanus and Nienhuis. In the current study, we also examine the quality of word knowledge among advanced learners of French as a second language (L2) by means of a word associates test. We studied the development of word knowledge among 6 groups of university-level participants, who were (a) native speakers of French and (b) learners of French as a foreign language with 2 different first languages (L1s), Dutch and English. The format of the test differed from that used in the 2001 Greidanus and Nienhuis study as follows: (a) The tested words were less frequently used French words; (b) the participants were native speakers of French in addition to two categories of advanced learners of French; (c) the number of associate words (fixed or not) was an independent variable. The findings showed that both native and nonnative speakers of French progressed in deep-word knowledge when the results of third-and fourth-year students were compared with those of first-year students. Although the test contained a considerable number of French-English cognates, the L1 English learners did not perform better than the Dutch learners. The words tested were not noticeably more difficult when chosen from the 10,000 word level rather than from the 5,000 word level.IN RECENT YEARS, DEPTH OF LEXICAL knowledge has become a matter of growing interest. By depth of lexical knowledge we mean all the knowledge that a speaker can have about a given word. Nation (1990) distinguished four dimensions of lexical knowledge: form (oral, written), position (grammatical, collocations), function (frequency, appropriateness), and meaning (concept and associations). There are no tests that examine all these aspects of lexical knowledge concurrently. Tests aiming to measure the vocabulary knowledge of advanced learners concentrate on grammatical and semantic aspects.